In Her Name: The Last War (65 page)

She turned away in revulsion, fighting to keep hold of her sanity as the male eagerly moved toward her. The apprentice healer held Li’ara-Zhurah’s shoulders, trying as best she could to comfort her, while the senior healer guided the male’s efforts.

Li’ara-Zhurah’s thoughts faded to blackness as her body responded to the male’s pheromones. She cried out at the momentary pain, whimpering in her heart for the love of her Empress, and begging the First Empress — wherever She was — to return and lift this curse from them all. 

What came after was blessed darkness.

* * *

Tesh-Dar stood in her quarters, part of the complex of buildings that made up the
kazha
of which she was headmistress. Having returned to the Homeworld from her audience with the Empress on the Empress Moon, her thoughts remained fixed on Li’ara-Zhurah. She could clearly hear the melody of the young warrior’s Bloodsong that carried her fear and pain, and she ground her teeth at the thought that she was powerless to aid her. Tesh-Dar did not even truly understand what the young warrior was going through, for she herself had never mated. Being born sterile was both a blessing and a curse: she was not subject to the need to mate every great cycle to continue living, but she was a bystander in the continuity of her species, standing a world apart from those who could give birth. 

She allowed herself a moment of guilt, for she did not feel this way for all of her wards. She cared deeply for all of them, every warrior of every generation she had helped to train here, but for a very few she found that she cared more. Li’ara-Zhurah was among them. It had nothing to do with her being a blood daughter of the Empress, for such things as favoritism had been bred out of her race eons before when the Bloodsong took hold and one’s feelings were exposed to all. That had triggered the age of Chaos, when her species was torn apart by countless wars before the First Empress and Unification. 

No. She felt strongly for Li’ara-Zhurah because of who she was in her heart and spirit. A part of Tesh-Dar fervently wished that this young warrior would be the one with whom she could share her inheritance from the Desh-Ka order, who could follow in Tesh-Dar’s footsteps as high priestess. For Tesh-Dar was the last of her kind: after the death of the First Empress, the warrior priestesses of the ancient orders were only permitted to select a single soul as a replacement, transferring their powers to their acolyte in a ceremony that dated back tens of thousands of cycles before the Empire was founded. If Tesh-Dar died before passing on her knowledge, the powers of the Desh-Ka, the greatest of all the warrior sects in the history of her race, would be lost forever. She was already older by fifty cycles than was normal for her kind, and old age gave little warning before death would take her. There was no gradual descent into infirmity over the course of years for the warriors, no time to make considered choices for an acolyte: when a warrior’s body reached the time appointed by Fate, death came in days, weeks at most. Even the healers could not predict when it was time to pass into the Afterlife until a warrior’s body began to shut down.

Dying without an heir was one of the few things Tesh-Dar had ever truly feared in her long life. But she could not choose an heir out of fear, for it was a choice she could make only once. After she surrendered her powers to her successor, there was no turning back.

“Do not let your heart be troubled so, great priestess,” a voice said softly from behind her. 

Tesh-Dar turned to see Pan’ne-Sharakh standing at the open door. Of the many souls Tesh-Dar had known in her life, Pan’ne-Sharakh was unique. The greatest living mistress of the armorer caste, she was among the oldest of their race, far older even than Tesh-Dar. Such were her skills that she had served as the armorer of the reigning Empress and the Empress before Her, eventually retiring from Her personal service as age took its toll. Pan’ne-Sharakh’s collar was the only one in all the Empire that bore more pendants than Tesh-Dar’s, with rows hanging down nearly to her waist, shimmering against the black of her robes. Tesh-Dar had known her since Tesh-Dar was a child, but much of their lives had been spent on opposite sides of the galaxy. After Tesh-Dar had taken over as headmistress at this
kazha
several dozen cycles ago, Pan’ne-Sharakh had joined her, and since then they had been nearly constant companions whose personalities complemented each other: Tesh-Dar was the embodiment of physical power and ferocity, while Pan’ne-Sharakh represented wisdom and faith. 

“Forgive me, mistress,” Tesh-Dar told her with a warm but troubled smile, “but much weighs upon my heart.”

“As it must in this time of war,” Pan’ne-Sharakh replied as she shuffled into the room. “Something to ease your troubles, great priestess,” she said with an impish grin as she held up two mugs of the bitter ale that was a favorite drink among their kind. 

“You will put the healers to shame,” Tesh-Dar told her, gratefully accepting one of the large mugs. After she took a long swallow of the warm, bitter drink, she said, “It is not the war with the humans that troubles me, mistress. It is my own mortality. I do not fear death, but if it comes before I have found a successor...” She shrugged. “Then my life — and that of all those who came before me — will have been without meaning, without purpose. I believe Li’ara-Zhurah is the one I would choose, but her soul is yet stricken with grief, and anguished all the more by her first mating. She is the closest I have ever found to a worthy successor, yet I am unsure.” She paused, staring out the window of her quarters at the Empress Moon. “
I must
be certain. I can make no mistake.” She would rather face a
genoth
, a great and deadly dragon native to the Homeworld, with her bare talons than endure the bitter emptiness of failure. She fought to keep the rising tide of trepidation in her soul from gaining a firm hold, for the strength of her Bloodsong carried her emotions to every soul in the Empire like tall waves upon the ocean, and it was irresponsible of her to let her worries so taint the great river of their race’s collective soul. 

“To my words, you will listen, child,” Pan’ne-Sharakh said in an ancient dialect of the Old Tongue that was rarely spoken anymore. She lifted a hand to the center of Tesh-Dar’s chest, gently placing her palm on the cyan rune of the Desh-Ka that blazed from her shimmering black armor, and said, “In all the cycles of my long life, never have I known a greater soul than yours, save for the Empress Herself. Upon the second step from the throne do you stand, high priestess of the Desh-Ka, but not merely for your feats of courage and glory. What has made you great is here, in your heart, a heart that is known throughout the Empire. I know not if Li’ara-Zhurah is to be your chosen one. But know it
you
will, when the time is upon you. No doubt, no uncertainty will there be. All that has come to pass in the thousands of generations since the First Empress left us has been for a purpose. The strength and powers you received after the Change, when you became high priestess of the Desh-Ka, was for a purpose.” Her eyes blazed as she stared up at Tesh-Dar, radiating an inner strength that Tesh-Dar could feel pulsing through the Bloodsong. “Yes, the End of Days for the First Empire looms.
Yet even this has a purpose.
”

“But what?” Tesh-Dar asked in frustration. “The end of all that we have ever done, all that we have ever created? Leaving behind nothing but dead monuments to half a million cycles of the Way?”

“No, my child,” Pan’ne-Sharakh said, a knowing look on her face, as if she had already seen the future. “The death of the First Empire shall herald the birth of the Second.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

The conference room was small and sparsely furnished with a faux wood table and a dozen comfortable but well-worn chairs. Several vidcom units that had seen better days were spread out over the table top. A large wall display, the only device in the room less than ten years old, glowed with brilliant images. The carpet, once a regal blue, had long since faded, with the deep pile worn through to the nap in several places. The odors of caustic cleaners, furniture polish, and air fresheners competed with the reek of stale cigarette smoke for dominance in the room’s confines. The air handlers had never worked properly, and there were no windows to air out the smell, for this room was buried a hundred meters below the surface. And it was always either too hot or too cold here.

The room’s hand-me-down appearance was ignored by the men and women who sat around the table. Like the room itself, they were shabby and worn. Their eyes, however, reflected hope and determination as they focused their attention on the wall display. 

“Turn it up, please,” said the man seated at the head of the table. In his mid-fifties, he had the distinguished look of a scholar, with a patrician nose and high cheekbones that set off a pair of blue eyes sparkling with intelligence. His well-trimmed hair had been brown, but was now mostly gray, and had receded little over the years. He had taught English literature at a university on Earth for a number of years before he had been compelled to return to his home planet of Riga, eventually becoming President of his home world’s government. It was a grandiose-sounding position that, in reality, left him little more than a figurehead, a lackey to the greater power that controlled his planet and its people. He tried to suppress the hope that the words he was about to hear from a woman he had never met would mean the release of his planet from bondage and tyranny. Although a man who was well acquainted with disappointment, he found that he was unable to hold back a tingle of excitement. His name was Valdis Roze.

A young man with deep circles under his eyes quickly manipulated the controls for the wall display, bringing up the volume, and the recording of what had taken place on Earth three weeks ago began to play. Roze had asked the young man to skip forward past the pomp and ceremony and go straight to the speech. He wanted to see, to hear, the words of the first President of the Confederation of Humanity. He knew she had intended for everyone in the human sphere to hear her words, but not all humans were allowed such privileges. Information access for the citizens of Riga was tightly controlled by their masters on the neighboring planet of Saint Petersburg. 

A rarity among the great numbers of stars in the galaxy, the Saint Petersburg system had two habitable worlds. The system had been settled in the first wave of the Diaspora, the great exodus from Earth that occurred after the series of wars that had shattered governments and killed several hundred million people. The colonists had been ethnic Russians, plus many people from Russia’s immediate neighbors, including the Baltic states. The colony had done well for half a century until the government, controlled by the Russian majority, turned to tyranny. Most of the non-Russian groups were eventually forced to resettle on the system’s other habitable planet, which had been named Riga. But “habitable” did not necessarily mean comfortable, and Riga’s bitter winters and devastating storms during the summer months made survival a challenge. 

The government on Saint Petersburg retained tight control for the next couple of centuries until a visiting dignitary of the
Alliance Française
, investigating allegations of genocide on Riga, was assassinated by the Saint Petersburg secret police. That had triggered the Saint Petersburg War, with Earth and the
Alliance Française
leading a military coalition that had as its goal the liberation of Riga and the institution of a democracy there. The ruling government had not gone down easily, and it took six years of bloody fighting before they were finally defeated. 

The victory left a weak Saint Petersburg government in its wake, and in the years that passed after the weary coalition forces returned home, old habits began to reemerge. Roze thought about how, over the last half dozen years, the Saint Petersburg government had quietly reasserted its hold on its former possession. Their secret police no longer murdered Rigan citizens in the middle of the night, but the oppression was no less real. While Riga still enjoyed diplomatic relations with many worlds, Saint Petersburg controlled all inter-system communications. They also held Riga’s economy in an iron grip of outrageous taxation and open corruption, and none of the worlds that had helped Riga before seemed inclined to challenge Saint Petersburg a second time on their behalf.

Now alien invaders had come to the human sphere, apparently bent on little but death and destruction. 

Roze thought of his reaction — stark incredulity — at the news that the
Aurora
, a Terran survey vessel, had made first contact with a sentient species that had murdered the ship’s crew. Then came the annihilation of the colony on Keran, which threw most of the human sphere into a panicked uproar. The Saint Petersburg government, in typical fashion, had flatly labeled the entire affair a hoax, but in Roze's eyes, that only served to increase the odds of it being true. The video reports of the battle that his agents had smuggled past Saint Petersburg’s censors were too surreal to be even a Bollywood production. Saint Petersburg jealously controlled the communications buoys that stored and received information from the courier ships that carried information from star to star. While the Rigans could officially send and receive only what the Saint Petersburg government allowed, a well-established web of spies and informants ensured that the Rigan leadership was well-informed. 

“That’s fine,” President Roze said when the young man brought the volume up. The audio was just as impressive as the image display: Roze felt like he was standing right next to Natalie McKenna, former President of the Terran Planetary Government and now President of the Confederation, as she began to speak.

 “Citizens of the Confederation,” she began, her strong voice a reflection of the will that had carried the Terran Planetary Government from a state of denial to a fierce determination to survive in the aftermath of the Kreelan invasion and destruction of the human colony on Keran. “
Citizens of the Confederation
,” she repeated. “While there are and have been governments in the human sphere made up of more than one world, for the first time since the Diaspora have we truly begun to look beyond our differences, to unite for a common purpose. That purpose, my fellow citizens — my fellow
humans
— is our survival as a species.